Parkinson’s Law of Triviality and Story Sizing

Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job was to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time on discussions about relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the non-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticise constructively.

I see this phenomenon in play during team story sizing exercises in the following scenarios.

In the context of the story being sized, the relative expertise of each of the team members is close to equal in terms of experience and depth of knowledge. The assumption is that if everyone on the team is equally qualified to estimate the effort and complexity of a particular story then the estimation process should move along quickly. With a skilled team, this does, indeed, occur. If it is a newly formed team or if the team is new to agile principles and practices, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality can come into play as the effort quickly gets lost in the weeds.

In the context of the story being sized, the relative expertise of the team members is not near parity and yet each of the individual team members has a great deal of expertise in the context of their respective functional areas. What I’ve observed happening is that the team members least qualified to evaluate the particular story feel the need to assert their expertise and express an opinion. I recall an instance where a software developer estimated it would take 8 hours of coding work to place a “Print This” button on a particular screen. The credentialed learning strategist (who asked for the print button and has no coding experience) seemed incredulous that such an effort would require so much time. A lengthy and unproductive argument ensued.

To prevent this I focus my coaching efforts primarily on the product owner as they will be interacting with the team on this effort during product backlog refinement session more frequently than I. They need to watch for:

Strong emotional response by team members when a size or time estimate is proposed.

Conversations that drop further and further into design details.

Conversations that begin to explore multiple “what if” scenarios.

The point isn’t to prevent each of these behaviors from occurring. Rather manage them. If there is a strong emotional response, quickly get to the “why” behind that response. Does the team member have a legitimate objection or does their response lack foundation?

Every team meeting is an opportunity to clarify the bigger picture for the team so a little bit of conversation around design and risks is a good thing. It’s important to time box those conversations and agree to take the conversation off-line from the backlog refinement session.

When coaching the team, I focus primarily on the skills needed to effectively size an effort. Within this context I can also address the issue of relative expertise and how to leverage and value the opinions expressed by team member who may not entirely understand the skill needed to complete a particular story.

(John Cook cites another interesting example of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (a.k.a. the bike shed principle) from Michael Beirut’s book How to involving the design of several logos.)